Nomadic Tent Types in the Middle East, a Book Review

I bought this book thinking that it might be about Black Tents. It isn't.  It's mostly about Yurts. Was I disappointed? Yes, at first.  Am I still disappointed? No.  Did this book cost a lot of money? Yes, something like $160 on Amazon. Is it worth the price? Yes.
But let's move on beyond my initial disappointment and the high cost. Let's examine mundane particulars.
The book is not one book but two physical objects which the author has named volumes.

Volume 1 is Text, all text, no pictures.

Volume 2 is pictures mostly, photos and illustrations with some small amount of text.
The choice of separating pictures from the text seemed odd to me. Imagine a magazine or newspaper that came in parts, one part with all the text and the other with all the photos.  See what I mean? Hard to imagine.  But Professor Andrews must have had his reasons for proceeding in this manner.

And here's a picture of the spines of the two volumes back to back. No scale provided, but they add up to a stack of paper just a tad over 1-5/8 inches thick.
If you have just a casual interest in the tents of nomads, you probably wouldn't buy this book.  But if you have an interest in actually building yurts, you might want to buy this book because this book is about as detailed an account of yurts as you are likely to find anywhere.  The author, an academic who started out as an architect describes and illustrates each of the yurt types in sufficient detail that someone with some handy skills could reproduce any of the tents covered in the two volumes.  For each yurt, this author describes pretty much all of what you would want to know about it, dimensions of the whole thing and all its parts, setup and teardown procedures, weight, how many camels it takes to carry, arrangement of furniture, tools used to make the parts and where they used to be used.
There are cheaper books on how to build yurts, but if you want to build an exact replica of a particular yurt type, there is probably no better place to go than this.
Some more notes about confusion.  These two volumes of Nomad Tent Types are part 1 of a two part series.  Part 1 which this is, is framed tents, roughly, yurts.  Part 2, I think will be black tents, which had a target publication date of 1999 but as far as I know, is still in the works.  It was part 2 which I had wanted to buy and part 1 is what I got.  But still a good resource.
If you want more reviews, go to Peter Andrews' website.  And this review I found particularly well written.  All in all, the book is a valuable work, given that nomads are getting urbanized and many have stopped making their traditional tents.